Manage social media easier with the right tools

Since the late 90’s social media has played an increasingly important part in our lives. From the early days of ICQ, Friendster and Myspace, through the Facebook (r)evolution, to WhatsApp, Snapchat, Baidu and Instagram. Without pausing for breath each of us pours our life from one platform to the latest new one, in a snowstorm of information.

With all those competing networks and noise, how can we continue to engage and interact with our networks, yet make things easier to manage? In both our personal and working lives?

Thankfully, there are some fantastic software applications out there which do exactly that. Focussing on Twitter for today – here are just 5 of them.

Keeping track of your timeline, mentions and messages on Twitter can be incredibly time consuming. That’s where Tweetdeck comes in. Tweetdeck creates a single page dashboard for all the different streams of information you could possibly need – for both your personal account and your business. Allowing you to tweet or retweet from inside the module and keep an eye on hashtag content so you can be ahead of the curve for engaging the right audiences.

Falcon.io takes monitoring a step further by combining over 4.8 million different online sources to draw a single picture of the social media landscape, and know who’s saying what about your business. Falcon.io offers Content marketing, analytics and reporting functionality adds to the experience which makes it the single most important tool for managing your customer experience online.

Posting updates on Twitter usually occurs in bursts, over breakfast in the morning, or on the evening commute. But your business needs to be communicating constantly with your audiences. Buffer is a clever piece of software that posts updates on your behalf based on a predefined schedule, across Twitter and other platforms. Very handy!

Crowdfire is one we’ve featured before – a great application that really helps to manage your Twitter network. By tracking your personal and business accounts you can see new follows and unfollows, and make immediate decisions on whether to follow-back or cut them loose. Tracking inactive following and even copying followers from other similar accounts to yours to make finding the right influencers simple.

With all this effective management going on, tracking your influence is tricky. Klout is another dashboard which allows you to share content on Twitter but it’s real advantage is it’s influence score which tracks the impact you’re having based on individual posts and overall – meaning you can see and report on how well you’re managing yours and your business accounts.

To discover more social media software – and thousands of other cool business applications – check out Crozdesk.com